Actual Innocence Should Matter

Senator Eric Schneiderman (D, Manhattan) should be congratulated for sponsoring Senate Bill 6234, which establishes actual innocence as grounds for re-opening a criminal case. Over the last two years, Schneiderman, chair of the Senate codes committee, has conducted a series of public hearings around New York State to investigate the causes behind New York State’s shameful record of wrongful convictions. His newly-introduced legislation, the “Actual Innocence Act,” represents an important step in the right direction. (See NYADP’s memorandum of support below.)

“What!?” you might ask, “We have to pass a new law to make sure that people who are found innocent will be set free from prison!?” The short answer is “yes” – but I will explain:

Non-lawyers commonly assume that the primary purpose of criminal appeals is to protect the innocent by uncovering wrongful convictions. On the contrary, the purpose of the criminal appeals process is to ensure consistency in the application of the law. As a result, some obviously guilty defendants have their convictions overturned because of procedural errors in their trials. When this happens, prosecutors have the option of trying them again and these defendants are usually re-convicted using a fairer process.

Unfortunately, some innocent but wrongly convicted defendants enjoy no similar privilege. Not, at any rate, if their trials were conducted without discernible procedural errors. In our legal system, trial juries are the fact-finders of record, and rarely does an appeals court deign to second-guess a jury. There are at least two problems with this way of doing business: 1. Juries sometimes make bad decisions; and 2. New evidence of actual innocence may surface years after a conviction was handed down.

A Westchester County jury got it wrong when it convicted Jeffrey Deskovic of murder and rape despite DNA evidence that clearly exonerated him. Doug Warney of Rochester spent additional years in prison despite new advances in DNA technology that enabled forensic investigators to conclude that Warney’s DNA did not match that of the killer. In both cases, prosecutors refused or, at best, dragged their feet before reopening cases in which trial juries had convicted innocent people. The challenge for the defendant is even greater when new evidence involves something less scientific than DNA – say, a recantation by an eyewitness or a jailhouse snitch, or strong circumstantial evidence pointing to a different perpetrator.

Consider the wrongful convictions that sent Roy Brown, Marty Tankleff, and Francisco Burmudez to prison. In each case, it required many years and much luck, including public support from influential friends (in Tankleff’s case, it took an unusual move by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to re-investigate the case), before justice was finally done.

Why are prosecutors so reluctant to seek justice for wrongfully convicted individuals? For one thing, not all imprisoned people who claim innocence are truly innocent, so prosecutors are reluctant to expend scarce resources rehashing old cases. But there is also another reason why prosecutors sometimes stand in the way of justice. They work within an adversarial system. It is their job to convict, not to defend a defendant whom they believe to be guilty. In working to convince a jury, sometimes they unconsciously inoculate themselves to the truth. In high-profile cases, they often behave like politicians in campaign mode. In fact, they are (in the case of District Attorneys) politicians – elected officials for whom it could be politically damaging to admit a mistake. Prosecutors in these cases are not bad people (at least no worse, on average, than the rest of us) but people caught in a structural dilemma, making it difficult for them to maintain an objective perspective as justice demands.

Thanks to Colleen Eren for penning NYADP’s memorandum of support:

Memorandum in support of S. 6234 (Schneiderman)

In relation to finding actual innocence as an appropriate basis for NY courts to overturn a criminal conviction.

New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NYADP) strongly supports this legislation and urges its swift passage.

Senate Bill 6234 is urgently needed since at least ninety-five persons have been clearly identified in New York as having been wrongfully convicted of serious offenses, including crimes of murder and rape, that they did not commit.

In 2007, The Innocence Project released its report “Lessons Not Learned,” which found that New York leads the nation in the number of wrongful convictions, but lags in policy reforms designed to address them. Since 2000 alone, at least fifteen (15) New York citizens have been released from prison after their murder convictions were overturned on grounds of actual innocence. Yet, the Criminal Procedure Law currently offers little hope to those who have been wrongly convicted that evidence supporting their claim of innocence, however convincing it may be, will receive consideration as grounds for overturning their convictions.

As a result, justice is being denied not only to those who have been wrongfully convicted, but to the citizens and law enforcement officers of New York State whose safety is compromised when the true perpetrator is left at large. In such cases, justice is also denied to crime victims and their families.

New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, which supports policies that reduce violence and that promote healing among those affected by violence, encourages the adoption of S. 6234, which amends the criminal procedure law to allow for a claim of actual innocence as legal grounds to challenge a conviction.